Side by side, Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh scream the birth of expressionism

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The exhibition Munch: Van Gogh shows the two artists, who never met, shared a passionate desire to paint the savage intensity of life – and it casts fresh light on the Dutchman’s tragedy

A gunshot and a scream reverberate through the yellow house, echo across the fjord, and fill a new exhibition at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam with pity and terror.

In 1890 Vincent van Gogh fatally shot himself in the French countryside. Three years later the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was walking near Oslo’s fjord at sunset. As the sun went down, he remembered years later, he was seized by a dreadful vision:

Munch was the friend Van Gogh never found. Would he have been a better companion than Gauguin?

If a psychiatrist were asked which of these painters was most troubled, the diagnosis would be easy: Munch

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